The Public Mental Health Framework: thinking about law as preventive medicine

Health, mental health, and well-being are not ‘natural’ but are shaped by social and environmental factors. This article aims to reorient the development of all laws and policies to do more to prevent mental ill-health and promote well-being as a core function of the contemporary state. It introduces a new conceptual and empirical model, the Public Mental Health Framework, based on three areas of research: (i) the social determinants of health and mental health, which include social structures and daily living conditions (such as poverty, inequality, education, employment, discrimination, adverse childhood experiences, and crime); (ii) health and human rights; and (iii) the intermediate social model of disability. It then explains how the Public Mental Health Framework can be incorporated into law and policy development through parliamentary analysis similar to that used for ‘statements of compatibility’ in the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) and legislation such as the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (Wales), interdepartmental administrative structures, proactive strategic planning, and continued advocacy.